The Holy Spirit Lutheran Church on Route 9 in Stafford Township is an ordinary brick building with stained glass panels and a tall spire with a metal cross gleaming in the sky.

Just like parishioners elsewhere, the members of the church organize projects to help charities, prepare for Easter and gather to worship in their church’s main sanctuary.

But several times a week, this place fills with a different crowd.

A white projector screen descends from the ceiling to cover up the long cross at the altar. Boys donning scull caps sit along the wooden pews and chant in Hebrew. Jewish girls and women light the Shabbat candles.

Men draped in white prayer shawls show up on certain Saturday mornings to honor the young congregants’ coming-of-age – the B’nai Mitzvah. Rabbi Kim Geringer commutes here from Short Hills twice a month to conduct services.

And every Tuesday after school, the church’s recreation rooms fill with Jewish children ages 6 to 14 working together to make sense of their roots: their religion, their history and the language of their ancestors.

“I am here because I am Jewish, and I like to learn,” Casey Gill, age 9, of Barnegat, wrote in his journal.

“Coming here is uplifting,” said Emily Miller, 14, also a resident of Barnegat. “This is kind of like a family.”

They call themselves Congregation Sha’arey Ha-Yam, Hebrew for “Gates of the Sea.”

The arrangement with the Holy Spirit Church works well enough. The Jewish congregation helps the church with their fundraising efforts. The church, in turn, is accommodating and hospitable to its Jewish tenants.

“We don’t really think of them as our tenants,” said Pastor Steven Plank of the Holy Spirit Lutheran Church. “We are just so pleased to have them. They are a wonderful, thriving group. Yes, we have different faiths. But we share the same God.”

Of course, the Jewish congregants hope to one day create a permanent physical home for themselves –  an honest-to-goodness shul, with their own designs on the stained glass windows. The congregation is involved in furious fundraising just for that purpose: organizing diner rounds, Fancy Nancy-themed soirees for young girls, Judaica gift boutiques every November.

In the meantime, the members of the congregation are after something more important, something more lasting than any building could ever be. “We do not call ourselves a temple or a synagogue,” said Cyndy Friedland, who started this Reform Jewish community in Barnegat in 2004 when she moved here from Long Beach Island. “We are a congregation. A community.”

The congregation first met in Barnegat Nursing Home. Then they moved to another church in Barnegat. Now Sha’arey Ha-Yam boasts more than a hundred members.

“We are young and old, straight and gay, single and partnered,” according to the welcome message on the group’s website, www.reformjewishcommunity.org, “born Jewish, Jews-by-Choice, and interfaith. We come from Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Orthodox Jewish backgrounds as well as other religious traditions and no religious traditions.”

Interfaith families, where one or more members of the family are not Jewish, comprise about 40 percent of the congregation.

This was exactly the sort of community Friedland envisioned when she and the early members gathered for the first time. 

Raised in a household shared by a Russian Orthodox and a “strict Methodist,” then later formally converted to Judaism, Friedland vowed to keep her Reform congregation open to diversity.

 “Without diversity, we don’t have a future,” she said.